Data Flow

The leaflet from the NRA misleadingly calls it a freeeflow windscreen tag. It costs me €1 per month – plus a charge every time I use a toll road.

What disturbed me is that once I entered the registration number of my car, the website paused for a second, updated the page, and was immediately able to tell me the make, model, colour and country of registration of my car.

Was it really necessary to do that?

It’s bad enough that I have to send personal information over the net, even if it is through the secure protocols of https, but why should the website designers feel the need to send any information back. Anyone could have gone to the website, then added a car reg at random.

With laptop computers going missing from government departments seemingly on a daily basis, why couldn’t the site just for make and model, and if necessary tell me that the information I entered didn’t match their database record.

And having bought a Tag account, I can’t pay by credit card, only by debit or laser card. Who on earth decided this was convenient?